6 ms·

I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug

I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over. Unless it serves a legitimate law enforcement end, either as part of a punishment for being convicted of a crime or to aid the public in the search for a fugitive, it should simply not ever be released to the public in any form. And frankly the former seems inhumane for all but the most serious crimes.

aspaceman 5y ago
My local police department posts mugshots on their Twitter, sends copies to the local newspaper, and types up a detailed report for the local radio station for _every_ _single_ _interaction_. "John Doe was pulled over by X police Saturday afternoon for a speeding violation. Jane Y was ..." And every Sunday, the local station plays these. So you know every single person who was pulled over. The vehicle they drive. Etc. Small towns are a special sort of hell. You get pulled over and your grandma is on your case about it. What's really sad is you get used to hearing "resisting a police officer" as their supposed reason for getting brought in - you'll get one a month usually.
- sprite 5y ago
  That’s crazy.
- swiley 5y ago
  It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information. The police could chill out though and not make a bad situation worse.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    There's a difference between the information simply being "public" and a social media account blasting out people's mugshots on Twitter.
    - andrewla 5y ago
      I think, importantly, that there is no difference. Once the information is out there, it's out there. You can attempt to have a "right to be forgotten" but that's just relying on people to voluntarily comply. If I have a jpeg no force in the world can make me delete it if I want to preserve it. Public "but only available if you go to city hall" is at least a little more restrictive until Zillow sends out people to start scanning public documents so they can build up their data. Not public is really the best way to go; and here it sounds like the town has decided that part of the punishment for minor civil infractions is to be put in stocks in the town square, which might once have been enough to shame people into not stealing horses, but now carries a stigma that could last for your entire life.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information. Interactions that don’t result in charges will not. (That doesn’t mean some of it, at least, is not still technically public information that would be disclosable in response to a sunshine request, but there is a difference between that and publicly-advertised information.)
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    I agree that all of this info is public anyways - and back in the day I bet you could go to the library and look it all up. But having it blasted out on a public radio program every week is too much for me.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  This isn't a "small town" thing. This is a "rich enough to afford a police department bigger than they need so the police can justify spending the man hours on BS" town thing. It happens in plenty of medium sized towns and small cities. If the cops were stretched thin busting meth labs or dealing with Real Crime(TM) they wouldn't be doing that.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    It's probably office staff, not the cops, who have the Twitter account.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      And who's budget pays the office staff? It's all under the same municipal umbrella at the end of the day. You can't get away with (at least not easily and not for a long period of time) wasting man-hours ($$$) on stuff that has no positive impact toward whatever metrics you are evaluated against (crime stats in the case of the cops) when resources are tight.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > You can't get away with (at least not easily and not for a long period of time) wasting man-hours ($$$) on stuff that has no positive impact toward whatever metrics you are evaluated against (crime stats in the case of the cops) when resources are tight. Most police departments are not really evaluated on crime stats, they are evaluated against the political satisfaction of the locally politically powerful (which tend to be the local economic elites.) Who is hurt by crime (and who gets away with it) is usually more important than the level of crime.
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Yeah. I considered adding a few sentences to the tune of "the politicians won't stick their necks out covering this waste unless they think there's political gain for them so this is really a reflection of the priorities of the people in the town" but felt that would drag things toward the direction of nit picking over what the people actually want. That said, at the small town level having less crime than the next town over is generally how you please everyone so there's a pretty good overlap between what the powers that be want the cops to deliver and "less crime". Police performance is kind of a malleable and hard to pin down thing.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > for _every_ _single_ _interaction_. I bet not, and that there is considerable selectivity (both based on legal mandates and police discretion) as to which interactions are reported and which facts about them are reported. Reporting a lot, however, is a good way of creating the impression that everything is being reported.
  - m463 5y ago
    Yes, a simple traffic stop will not lead to a mugshot. A severe driving incident and an impounded car might. As to just reporting incidents, I would imagine reporting non-convictions might be illegal. (though the people looking for say minority harassment might love the public data)
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >A severe driving incident and an impounded car might. E.g. giving the cop attitude after being pulled over for the crime of being the only one around to pull over at 1am.
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    To be clear, no they don't post a mugshot for a traffic stop. I mean that for all traffic stops (or at least, quite a damn few) they will report the full name, and the crime which tends to be speeding or a traffic violation. One degree up you'll get the speeding infraction _and_ they didn't have insurance or a suspended license. I've listened to this program every week for months now. I wish I was kidding.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over Note that these laws originated from a civil rights perspective. Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people.
- cabaalis 5y ago
  > Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people. I see this so much in our society. A reaction to a "bad" practice which was actually invented to combat another "bad" practice. It leads me to believe there is just no way to contractualize human behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.
  - delecti 5y ago
    I think it's just that some solutions are worse than their problems, and it's not always possible to know which are which beforehand.
    - Sanzig 5y ago
      I think it's one of those things that has changed due to the greatly reduced friction involved in accessing information as a result of the web. Back in the 70s, if you wanted to get a copy of a mugshot from an arrest, you'd have to go drive down to the appropriate government office (county clerk's office, courthouse, etc) and file a request. If you were in a different state, maybe you could file a request by mail, maybe you couldn't. The point is, it was enough of a hassle that you generally wouldn't bother unless you needed to. And even then, if you went and got copies of all the mugshots in the county, what are you going to do with them? Print a flyer and hand it out on the street? The internet changed all that. Now you can hoover up all the mugshots you want with an electronic request (some police departments even put them on their websites, so you can scrape away). You publish them online, and then Google indexes them and you've got a quasi-legal blackmail racket set up. As a society, I don't think we've quite come to terms yet with what mass access to indexed datasets over the internet means. Write a somewhat-regrettable letter to the editor of a local paper back in 1990 that got published? There's a good chance that's been digitized, OCR'd, and is available through a simple database search of your name.
tablespoon 5y ago
> I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over. I suppose they could also release future mug shots with a license that the images can't be distributed past such-and-such a date.
- akomtu 5y ago
  That would be a toothless law: some noname image board hosted in Somalia won't bother to respect US laws. Even US based firms won't care much because who's going to enforce the law? DAs on their own initiative? People on the mugshots?
- stevenicr 5y ago
  thinking similar.. mugshots still available to the public - however they must be obtained on an individual request basis, that comes with a license not to republish at all. This way anyone can get a mugshot - but no one can legally republish it - tech can give them tools to embed hidden artifacts to prove a republished pic was shared by person 1032 or whatever. This protects people from being dissipated and can help with lawyers and such, while protecting privacy from republishers that would be subject to dmca and such. I suppose similar could be done with names being posted online to some extent(?) - proprietary intellectual property? A way for family and lawyers to keep up with people but keeps others from profiting on public shame / ransom to take down.. legally could expand on laws similar to "it is illegal to photograph a person when that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy if that photograph would "offend or embarass an ordinary person" or if the photograph was taken for the "purpose of sexual arousal or gratificaiton of the defendant." Tenn. Code Ann. §39-13-605. " Having and republishing 'illegal' photos or something. All this reminds me of a saas idea I had some years ago about bail/lawyer/and notify your saved list of people - if your name is found in public arrest records online. Now I'm also thinking about people just iframing the police site - may need to hide photos on screen and only show if click/tap to agree to terms then show. I've had many thoughts on these things, should complete them more one of these days.
  - 5y ago
systematical 5y ago
Salt Lake County now makes you pay one dollar for a mugshot. That ended websites reposting the pictures.

aspaceman 5y ago

My local police department posts mugshots on their Twitter, sends copies to the local newspaper, and types up a detailed report for the local radio station for _every_ _single_ _interaction_. "John Doe was pulled over by X police Saturday afternoon for a speeding violation. Jane Y was ..." And every Sunday, the local station plays these. So you know every single person who was pulled over. The vehicle they drive. Etc. Small towns are a special sort of hell. You get pulled over and your grandma is on your case about it. What's really sad is you get used to hearing "resisting a police officer" as their supposed reason for getting brought in - you'll get one a month usually.

sprite 5y ago
That’s crazy.
swiley 5y ago
It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information. The police could chill out though and not make a bad situation worse.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  There's a difference between the information simply being "public" and a social media account blasting out people's mugshots on Twitter.
  - andrewla 5y ago
    I think, importantly, that there is no difference. Once the information is out there, it's out there. You can attempt to have a "right to be forgotten" but that's just relying on people to voluntarily comply. If I have a jpeg no force in the world can make me delete it if I want to preserve it. Public "but only available if you go to city hall" is at least a little more restrictive until Zillow sends out people to start scanning public documents so they can build up their data. Not public is really the best way to go; and here it sounds like the town has decided that part of the punishment for minor civil infractions is to be put in stocks in the town square, which might once have been enough to shame people into not stealing horses, but now carries a stigma that could last for your entire life.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It will end up on the feed the court publishes, so it's not like it isn't public information. Interactions that don’t result in charges will not. (That doesn’t mean some of it, at least, is not still technically public information that would be disclosable in response to a sunshine request, but there is a difference between that and publicly-advertised information.)
- aspaceman 5y ago
  I agree that all of this info is public anyways - and back in the day I bet you could go to the library and look it all up. But having it blasted out on a public radio program every week is too much for me.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
This isn't a "small town" thing. This is a "rich enough to afford a police department bigger than they need so the police can justify spending the man hours on BS" town thing. It happens in plenty of medium sized towns and small cities. If the cops were stretched thin busting meth labs or dealing with Real Crime(TM) they wouldn't be doing that.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  It's probably office staff, not the cops, who have the Twitter account.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    And who's budget pays the office staff? It's all under the same municipal umbrella at the end of the day. You can't get away with (at least not easily and not for a long period of time) wasting man-hours ($$$) on stuff that has no positive impact toward whatever metrics you are evaluated against (crime stats in the case of the cops) when resources are tight.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > You can't get away with (at least not easily and not for a long period of time) wasting man-hours ($$$) on stuff that has no positive impact toward whatever metrics you are evaluated against (crime stats in the case of the cops) when resources are tight. Most police departments are not really evaluated on crime stats, they are evaluated against the political satisfaction of the locally politically powerful (which tend to be the local economic elites.) Who is hurt by crime (and who gets away with it) is usually more important than the level of crime.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Yeah. I considered adding a few sentences to the tune of "the politicians won't stick their necks out covering this waste unless they think there's political gain for them so this is really a reflection of the priorities of the people in the town" but felt that would drag things toward the direction of nit picking over what the people actually want. That said, at the small town level having less crime than the next town over is generally how you please everyone so there's a pretty good overlap between what the powers that be want the cops to deliver and "less crime". Police performance is kind of a malleable and hard to pin down thing.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> for _every_ _single_ _interaction_. I bet not, and that there is considerable selectivity (both based on legal mandates and police discretion) as to which interactions are reported and which facts about them are reported. Reporting a lot, however, is a good way of creating the impression that everything is being reported.
- m463 5y ago
  Yes, a simple traffic stop will not lead to a mugshot. A severe driving incident and an impounded car might. As to just reporting incidents, I would imagine reporting non-convictions might be illegal. (though the people looking for say minority harassment might love the public data)
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >A severe driving incident and an impounded car might. E.g. giving the cop attitude after being pulled over for the crime of being the only one around to pull over at 1am.
- aspaceman 5y ago
  To be clear, no they don't post a mugshot for a traffic stop. I mean that for all traffic stops (or at least, quite a damn few) they will report the full name, and the crime which tends to be speeding or a traffic violation. One degree up you'll get the speeding infraction _and_ they didn't have insurance or a suspended license. I've listened to this program every week for months now. I wish I was kidding.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over Note that these laws originated from a civil rights perspective. Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people.

cabaalis 5y ago
> Requiring the publication of arrests makes it harder for the police to disappear people. I see this so much in our society. A reaction to a "bad" practice which was actually invented to combat another "bad" practice. It leads me to believe there is just no way to contractualize human behavior over a sufficiently long period of time.
- delecti 5y ago
  I think it's just that some solutions are worse than their problems, and it's not always possible to know which are which beforehand.
  - Sanzig 5y ago
    I think it's one of those things that has changed due to the greatly reduced friction involved in accessing information as a result of the web. Back in the 70s, if you wanted to get a copy of a mugshot from an arrest, you'd have to go drive down to the appropriate government office (county clerk's office, courthouse, etc) and file a request. If you were in a different state, maybe you could file a request by mail, maybe you couldn't. The point is, it was enough of a hassle that you generally wouldn't bother unless you needed to. And even then, if you went and got copies of all the mugshots in the county, what are you going to do with them? Print a flyer and hand it out on the street? The internet changed all that. Now you can hoover up all the mugshots you want with an electronic request (some police departments even put them on their websites, so you can scrape away). You publish them online, and then Google indexes them and you've got a quasi-legal blackmail racket set up. As a society, I don't think we've quite come to terms yet with what mass access to indexed datasets over the internet means. Write a somewhat-regrettable letter to the editor of a local paper back in 1990 that got published? There's a good chance that's been digitized, OCR'd, and is available through a simple database search of your name.

tablespoon 5y ago

> I like that the proposed bills here are not attempts to force sites to remove mug shots (which seems like a losing battle) but instead just resists posting mug shots at all, which seems like something that police departments have complete control over. I suppose they could also release future mug shots with a license that the images can't be distributed past such-and-such a date.

akomtu 5y ago
That would be a toothless law: some noname image board hosted in Somalia won't bother to respect US laws. Even US based firms won't care much because who's going to enforce the law? DAs on their own initiative? People on the mugshots?
stevenicr 5y ago
thinking similar.. mugshots still available to the public - however they must be obtained on an individual request basis, that comes with a license not to republish at all. This way anyone can get a mugshot - but no one can legally republish it - tech can give them tools to embed hidden artifacts to prove a republished pic was shared by person 1032 or whatever. This protects people from being dissipated and can help with lawyers and such, while protecting privacy from republishers that would be subject to dmca and such. I suppose similar could be done with names being posted online to some extent(?) - proprietary intellectual property? A way for family and lawyers to keep up with people but keeps others from profiting on public shame / ransom to take down.. legally could expand on laws similar to "it is illegal to photograph a person when that individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy if that photograph would "offend or embarass an ordinary person" or if the photograph was taken for the "purpose of sexual arousal or gratificaiton of the defendant." Tenn. Code Ann. §39-13-605. " Having and republishing 'illegal' photos or something. All this reminds me of a saas idea I had some years ago about bail/lawyer/and notify your saved list of people - if your name is found in public arrest records online. Now I'm also thinking about people just iframing the police site - may need to hide photos on screen and only show if click/tap to agree to terms then show. I've had many thoughts on these things, should complete them more one of these days.
- 5y ago

systematical 5y ago

Salt Lake County now makes you pay one dollar for a mugshot. That ended websites reposting the pictures.